Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Fri, 10 May 1996 10:38:25 -0400 (EDT) | From | Brian M Grunkemeyer <> | Subject | Re: ideas |
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Excerpts from mail: 10-May-96 Re: ideas by Alan Cox@cymru.net > We cant afford to blow megabytes of memory on little messages and billions > of extra checks that slow the machine down.
Putting a return at the end of such procedures would blow megabytes of memory and slow down the machine?
Let me tell you a story. In the early days of Excel, Apple made some changes to MacOS that caused the one existing version of Excel to crash. Microsoft didn't want to make a crucial change to one of their procedures because it added 12 clock cycles to the function, and it was a heavily used function. In their 3-hour Excel stress test, that function was called 76,000 times. Some programmer went ahead and made the change, just to see how much slower the new version would be. It was about .1 seconds slower on that 3 hour stress test. The change was left in.
I'm not trying to say that optimizations and good algorithms aren't important, but this really does present a case for not placing too much emphasis on efficiency.
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